The only reports you will read are from, or based on the accounts of, the men that were there....none of which will be purely objective. You suggest in post #7 that the Confederate representatives demanded the continuation of slavery (one of Lincoln's demands "in reverse")...yet no accounts, from any side, indicate that the Confederacy was demanding anything other than independence. One need not be a "Confederate apologist" to understand that Lincoln full well understood that slavery was a dying institution...the secession of the southern states would have expedited this. Lincoln himself stated this...Lincoln advocates like Harry Jaffa have stated this...Professor Jeffrey Hummel laid out a lengthy economic analysis in his book Freeing Slaves, Enslaving Free Men that confirms this. We should take Lincoln at his word that the war was waged to prevent the southern states from seceding...not to end slavery per se...and, again...the question is why? What moral or Constitutional authority did the federal government or the union states have to force the southern states to submit?
You know, if you want your questions answered, there are many tens of thousands of posts on similar thread you could look up. It's late, and I don't really care to get into it all again.
I do, however, think it is ludicrous to blame Lincoln for the collapse of constitutional government, as with the notable exception of Reconstruction the pre-war conditions returned after the war for many decades. Depending on whom you want to believe, the gradual growth in the power of the federal government really began with Teddy R., with Wilson during WWI, or with FDR and the New Deal.
Lincoln provided a precedent for what a President might have to do to preserve the Union in a civil war. Not for our present overpowering federal government during peacetime.
BTW, most of the "unconstitutional acts" of Lincoln were also implemented by Davis. War, especially civil war, is really, really hard on civil rights. War is Hell, and all that. People fighting for their lives are allowed to kill justifiably. States or nations fighting for their lives will probably also do things they would never do when they weren't forced into it.
If you think the old boys who wrote the Constitution were advocates of civil rights for the opposition during a civil war, look up how they treated the Loyalists. A great deal worse than how Lincoln treated traitors.
Hummel's argument is based on hindsight, not on what reasonable and informed people had reason to believe at the time on the basis of the available evidence. It's one of the tricks historical writers play on the dead.
Whatever the reasons why war began, by its end it was certainly, whatever else it was, also a war to free the slaves, and Lincoln did much to make it so. It was Seward who brought up the pending 13th Amendment at Hampton Roads and said that the Southern states, if they reentered the union would be able to vote against it. That was only what was true. If the secessionists rejoined the union, they would be able to have some voice in the affairs of he nation. Hay and Nicolay say that Stephens and the other Confederates made more of this than the Unionists did.
But Lincoln made it clear that Emancipation was always his policy. Lincoln who made it clear that slavery was doomed. According to Hay and Nicolay, Lincoln wasn't a party to Seward's way of persuading the rebels, and expected the 13th Amendment to pass, with Southern support. That's one reason why peace efforts failed at Hampton Roads and on other occasions. Stephens by contrast, wanted war with the Mexican regime, as a way of getting cooperation between the two sections without giving up the Confederacy.
You apparently want to make the war into a conflict between the compromising Lincoln and the rebels who stood firm for their "freedom" and "independence." But observers, then or now, have to consider just what independence would have meant for the slave states and what the Confederacy would have done with it. It's not balanced to judge Lincoln on the practical means he undertook to pursue his ends and not consider the practical policies that the Confederates adopted or were likely to adopt.
Don't be deceived by the "everyone believed in secession before Lincoln came along argument." It's not true. Many, if not most Americans, believed unilateral secession to be unconstitutional -- a form of revolt or revolution that could only be justified as a rebellion against real tyranny and repression.
A state could still turn to Congress or the constitutional amendment process to win approval for its separation from the union, but for a state simply to declare its relationship with the union dissolved wouldn't have been accepted by many Americans as constitutional.
You would need to be pretty naieve to believe it though. Considering that slavery was protected by every southern state constitution that I've seen, considering that slavery and slave imports were specifically protected by the confederate constitution, then it takes a pretty broad stretch of the imagination to think that southern independence would have hastened it's end. Just what do you base that on?
That is simply not true. Stephens, who you refer to, called slavery the "Cornerstone" of the Confederacy. Confederate politicians often spoke of expanding their new nation to the south to Cuba, Mexico and Central America. Yancey and Butler argued for reopening of the Atlantic Slave trade to supply the labor needs for an expanding empire. Those men, at that time, saw slavery as the future, not a 'dieing institution.'
To say that industrialization and technology would have caused slavery to die under it's own inefficiency in the decades after the Civil War may or may not be accurate and can only be stated as hindsight. (From Hitler to Stalin to Mao, we know well that mines, mills and factories can employ slaves as well as freemen). The men of the Confederacy who lived through that time and made the decisions, saw slavery as integral to their future.